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DON’T FORGET THE HISTORY OF COVID IN PRISON: AN INTERVIEW WITH
VICTORIA LAW  
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Maya Schenwar
March 11, 2025
Truthout
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_ The pandemic bared the cruelty of prison in new ways. It was a lost
opportunity to move away from mass incarceration. _

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March 11 marks the fifth anniversary of the day the World Health
Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, urging countries to
“double down” on protective actions. But for incarcerated people,
many of those protections remained out of reach. When COVID-19 hit the
United States, the millions of people incarcerated here were dealt
structural blows from every direction. From the virus’s rapid spread
behind bars, to the denial of adequate care, to authorities’ use of
COVID as a justification for even more punitive policies, incarcerated
people faced a devastating intersection of disease and systemic
abandonment. In many quarters, the story of that abandonment has been
quickly forgotten and even erased.

Thankfully, investigative journalist Victoria Law, a
longtime _Truthout _contributing writer
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(including _Prison By Any Other Name, _which she coauthored with me
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has stepped in to ensure that the history of COVID’s rise behind
bars is meticulously and trenchantly documented. Her powerful new
book, _Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties
of Incarceration,_
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a profound chronicle of systemic neglect, structural violence,
multitentacled injustice and inspiring resistance undertaken in times
of great peril. In this interview, Law discusses how this shattering
chapter in history has impacted people behind bars — and how they
have responded with action.

MAYA SCHENWAR: THE INITIAL PERIOD OF COVID WAS A TIME WHEN SO MANY
NORMS WENT OUT THE WINDOW, INCLUDING FOR THOSE OF US HERE IN THE
OUTSIDE WORLD. BUT MANY PEOPLE IN PRISON EXPERIENCED THE PANDEMIC IN
UNIQUE AND AMPLIFIED WAYS. IN _CORRIDORS OF CONTAGION, _YOU
CHRONICLE SOME OF THOSE STORIES. WHAT WERE PEOPLE EXPERIENCING INSIDE
THAT MIGHT BE DIFFERENT FROM WHAT MANY OF US EXPERIENCED OUT HERE?

VICTORIA LAW: At the beginning of the pandemic, inside jails and
prisons and other spaces of confinement — like immigration detention
centers, psychiatric hospitals, and other places in which people have
lost their liberty — there was very little bodily autonomy or
freedom of movement. There was also very little information coming in
or coming out. Jails and prisons are tightly controlled spaces. People
were not told, “There is a virus that is lethal and unknown and
highly contagious bearing down on you.”

I start with Mary Fish, who was incarcerated in Oklahoma, which had
the nation’s highest women’s incarceration rate for many years.
Its two women’s prisons are perpetually overcrowded. They were not
given very much information about why they had to lock in, why they
had to clean, why they had to wear masks. Because Mary had bought a
television set from commissary and was able to watch the news, she
knew that there was a virus that was heading to the U.S.

The same thing happened in Texas, where I interviewed Kwaneta Harris
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to _National Public Radio_ on a radio that she bought from
commissary. She was in solitary confinement. Nobody bothered to tell
anybody in solitary confinement about what was happening with the
pandemic. Nobody knew that somebody who was coughing and sneezing was
a potential vector for a deadly virus.

People got piecemeal information, so at first, they didn’t know how
to protect themselves, or that they _had _to protect themselves. And
even more than usual, they weren’t able to get information from the
outside. Prisons and jails, in an attempt to stop the virus from
coming in, stopped in-person visits very early on when the pandemic
hit the United States.

Testing inside was very rare at first. _Truthout_ readers may
remember in the early days, if you had a cold or if you had the
sniffles or if you didn’t feel so well, it was really difficult to
get a COVID test. Inside prisons, where you don’t have the ability
to walk to a drugstore or just go to the doctor, it was even harder to
get any verification.

Nobody knew how to keep safe. And everybody inside already knew that
they were in an environment that had proven again and again to be
utterly indifferent to their health and well-being.

AS THE PANDEMIC WENT ON, PARTICULARLY DURING THE SECOND WAVE, SOME
PRISONS THAT HADN’T BEEN PREVIOUSLY HIT WERE THEN HIT. ONE THING
THAT STRUCK ME IS HOW SOME PRISONS WERE STILL, SOMEHOW, CAUGHT
COMPLETELY UNPREPARED.

Yes, there had been months for jails and prisons to prepare. But the
measures that they had put in place, under this guise of public health
or prevention or protection, were actually just doubling down on
punishment. While we all sheltered at home, prisons used COVID as a
way to say, “We’re going to lock you in your cells for 23 to 24
hours a day.” Readers can imagine being locked in the smallest
bathroom in their house.

The prisons twisted and distorted some of the public health messaging.
For example, in New York, at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, the
state’s maximum-security prison for women, staff initially told
women that they could not wear the blue surgical masks with the blue
on the outside, because blue was the color of the uniforms of the
correctional officers.

Prisons themselves did not actually do things like stock up on masks
again, like figure out social distancing policies, like actually
require that their staff wear masks and wear them properly. The second
wave hit and we saw that prisons that had not had COVID outbreaks
before suddenly skyrocketed in cases.

At the same time, prison populations began to grow again. At the start
of the pandemic, many states had stopped sending people from jails to
prisons because courts were closed. But later, they largely discarded
these measures and prison populations grew.

In some instances, like in Oklahoma, they closed prisons and instead
of releasing people, they just crammed hundreds of people into already
overcrowded existing prisons, which then meant that the chances of the
virus skyrocketing just exponentially increased.

RIGHT, THERE WAS THAT MOMENT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE PANDEMIC WHEN IT
SEEMED LIKE SO MANY PEOPLE WERE GOING TO GET RELEASED, AND IT WOULD BE
A DECARCERATION MOMENT, AND THEN IT DID NOT PAN OUT. COULD YOU TALK
NOW ABOUT THE POTENTIAL FOR DECARCERATION EARLY IN THE PANDEMIC AND
WHAT ACTIVISTS WERE PUSHING FOR — AND THEN WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED?

When the pandemic started, even before it got to the United States,
what we saw was Iran and Turkey and other countries that did not have,
by any stretch of the imagination, sterling records on human rights,
issue mass releases from their jails and prisons in an attempt to stop
the spread of the coronavirus. In the United States, advocates,
formerly incarcerated people and legislators said we should be
releasing people. What happened in 2020 is that prisons released
549,622 people — but that was actually fewer people than had been
released the previous year. Of those, only 6 percent were released as
expedited releases or early releases. More people had actually been
released in the pre-pandemic 2019, when 608,026 people were released
from state and federal prisons. So, more people were released in 2019
when there wasn’t a lethal pandemic bearing down than in 2020.

This was a missed opportunity for the U.S. to rethink the idea that we
should lock people up and throw away the key forever and ever.
Instead, they doubled down on punishments like perpetual solitary
confinement, the canceling of visits, the canceling of programs, the
canceling of anything that might make a person’s life behind bars
more bearable and give them opportunities when they are released for
some sort of meaningful reintegration.

What we also saw during the pandemic was that the percentage of people
behind bars who tested positive for COVID was much greater than the
number of people in the general population who tested positive for
COVID. In 2021, there were almost 31,000 people for every 100,000
people in prisons, testing positive for COVID. Among the general
population in the U.S., 9,350 people for every 100,000 people tested
positive for COVID. That’s 3.5 times more in prison than it was in
the general population.

THAT’S HORRIFYING.

Yes. Also, what we have to remember is that the percent of deaths from
COVID skyrocketed behind bars. For every 100,000 people in prisons or
people behind bars, there were 200 deaths. In the general U.S.
population, for every 100,000 U.S. residents, 81 people died from
COVID-19.

DEVASTATING. THIS SAYS SO MUCH ABOUT HOW PRISONS RESPONDED TO COVID
INSIDE. ONE BRIGHT SPOT IN THE BOOK WAS HOW, EVEN AS YOU’RE
DESCRIBING ALL THESE DIRE CONDITIONS, YOU’RE ALSO TALKING ABOUT THE
WAYS THAT PEOPLE INSIDE HELPED EACH OTHER OUT, PRACTICED MUTUAL AID.
ONE OF YOUR INTERVIEWEES REFERRED TO MUTUAL AID AS “PRACTICING
SOCIALISM.” WHAT WERE SOME OF THE WAYS THAT PEOPLE INSIDE SUPPORTED
EACH OTHER DURING THE HEIGHT OF THE PANDEMIC?

In prison, showing humanity is often against prison rules and can be
punished in any number of terrible ways, from losing your ability to
shop at commissary or losing your phone calls, losing your visits,
getting thrown in solitary confinement, or getting a [disciplinary]
ticket, which affects your chance at early release. Something as
simple as making a cup of tea or making a bowl of soup for somebody in
the next cell who is not feeling well is punishable by any of these
things.

But early on in the pandemic, when people were not feeling well and
they realized that getting a positive test would mean being sent off
to solitary confinement, people were hiding their symptoms and other
incarcerated people were making sure that they were okay.

They would swing by their cells — at risk to themselves, since
sharing is prohibited — to make sure that they had what they
needed. _Do you need Gatorade? Do you need water? Do you need food?
What can we bring you from our already scarce supplies?_ People took
care of each other.

And in the COVID quarantine units, they were documenting staff abuses.
They were documenting how much time it took medical staff to respond
when an emergency happened. They were telling stories to their family
members and encouraging them to tell advocacy organizations on the
outside. They were encouraging them to call lawmakers, not just on
their own behalf, but on behalf of others inside.

YOU WROTE ABOUT SOME POWERFUL ORGANIZING THAT HAPPENED INSIDE AT THE
HEIGHT OF THE PANDEMIC, FROM HUNGER STRIKES TO WORKING WITH OUTSIDE
ADVOCATES. I WAS WONDERING IF YOU COULD DISCUSS SOME OF THIS
RESISTANCE.

We saw a diversity of tactics. People contacted folks on the outside,
people contacted media either directly or through advocates to let
them know what was happening.

In California, people inside called into Zoom meetings on the outside
to say, “Here’s what is happening in my housing unit.” Advocates
then rallied outside the houses of Gov. Gavin Newsom and
then-secretary for the California Department of Corrections, Ralph
Diaz. They rallied outside prisons as well.

People also sometimes staged protests at the immigration detention
centers. People staged protests over a video visiting technology to
say, “Hey, somebody died in here. We need PPE, we need release. If
ICE and GEO Group and CoreCivic cannot keep us safe from COVID-19,
they need to release us.”

People would stage protests at great risks to themselves; just like
sharing a pen is prohibited and punishable, having a protest is also
prohibited and highly punishable.

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK AND THEN AT THE END, YOU QUOTE ARUNDHATI
ROY’S PIECE
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THE BEGINNING OF THE PANDEMIC, IN WHICH SHE SAYS THE PANDEMIC COULD
POTENTIALLY BE A “PORTAL, A GATEWAY BETWEEN ONE WORLD AND THE
NEXT.” IMAGINING THAT THE COUNTRY _HAD_ EMBRACED THAT POSSIBILITY
OF A PORTAL, HOW DO YOU THINK OUR SOCIETY COULD HAVE RESPONDED TO THE
PANDEMIC IN WAYS THAT ACTUALLY HELPED CHALLENGE AND DISMANTLE THE
PRISON-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX?

First, the pandemic could’ve been an opportunity, or a portal, to
quote Arundhati Roy, for us to walk into a future in which we were not
addicted to perpetual punishment. It could have been an opportunity to
say, “We need to rethink, reenvision…. We need to rethink: Why are
we keeping so many people inside for so long? How do we get people
out?”

There have been numerous studies that show that education or health
care or housing — or all of these things — cost so much less than
locking people up. This was an opportunity to say: Hey, you know what?
Maybe if we’re not locking up so many people, maybe everybody gets
not just the one-time stimulus check, not just the two-time stimulus
check, but enough money so people can just stay home and get paid
until we figure out what the heck we’re doing about this pandemic.
If you don’t have a home, if we’re not putting so much money into
caging people, we can figure out how to convert unused hotels into
places for people to stay, where they can shower, where they can be by
themselves, where they aren’t facing either the elements or having
lots of strangers breathe on them, or facing all the systemic violence
that happens inside shelters.

If we had walked through this portal, we could say: Hey, maybe we can
really start to become a society in which we are caring for people, in
which we are shifting not just the material and financial resources,
although we do need to do that, but also the mindset, from “we’re
going to cage people” to “how do we take care of people?”

This could have been a portal into thinking: How do we want to make
our society more robust, more healthy, in ways that take care of
everybody?

_This interview has been edited for length and clarity._

_Maya Schenwar is director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots
Journalism. She is also Truthout‘s board president and editor at
large. She is the co-editor of We Grow the World Together: Parenting
Toward Abolition
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of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular
Reforms; author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t
Work and How We Can Do Better; and co-editor of
the Truthout anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police
Violence and Resistance in the United States. In addition
to Truthout, Maya’s work has appeared in many publications
including The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News and The
Nation, and she has appeared on Democracy Now!, MSNBC, C-SPAN,
NPR, and other television and radio programs. Maya is a cofounder of
the Movement Media Alliance (MMA) and Media Against Apartheid and
Displacement (MAAD). She lives in Chicago._

_Truthout is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to providing
independent reporting and commentary on a diverse range of social
justice issues. Since our founding in 2001, we have anchored our work
in principles of accuracy, transparency, and independence from the
influence of corporate and political forces. Truthout works to spark
action by revealing systemic social, racial, economic and
environmental injustice and providing a platform for progressive and
transformative ideas, through in-depth investigative reporting and
critical analysis. With a powerful, independent voice, we spur
transformations in consciousness and inspire both policy change and
direct action._

* Mass Incarceration
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* Pandemic
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* COVID-19
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